Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution,
the great libertarian author and teacher Robert LeFevre once told me
that the first money the United States government ever spent was a
$20,000 check from a Dutch bank, drawn on an account that didn't
exist.

Hence the expression, "You low-down, no-account bast... "
whatever.

Apparently this piece of financial chicanery was the doing of one
Alexander Hamilton, a literal bastwhatever, who also favored
deficit spending and maintaining a handsome national debt because he
reasoned that if the government owed people money, they'd have an
interest in making sure it survived.

Thus the American Empire was born in the shadow of a lie.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the
truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for
most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time
in advance.

Take the Civil Warthe name itself is a lie. A civil war is
what happens when two groups compete violently for control of the same
government. That's not what happened in America in the 1860s. Whatever
its other faults, the South had no interest at all in taking over and
ruling the North. What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of
secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what
happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

What makes it different in some people's minds is that one side in
the War between the States was fighting to end slavery, and the other
side, perversely, to preserve it. The trouble with that is that what
goes on in some people's minds is often the result of a lie, and this
is one of those instances.

Both sides in the American Revolution held and used slavesdoes
that somehow make American independence illegitimate? There are those
prepared to say it does.

But the War between the States was not about slavery, at all. It
was about discriminatory taxationthe South was paying 80 percent
at the timeand the centralization of authority. The best evidence
that it was not about slavery lies in the writings of abolitionists
like Frederick Douglass, who demanded, rather late in the war, that it
be made to be about slavery. He would not have demanded that if it
were already so, now would he?

If the War for Southern Independence was about slavery, why did
slavery remain a healthy institution in the North? Why did the Union
army take slaves away from Southerners, not to free them, but to use
their labor in their war against the South? Why were slaves kept busy,
all through the war, rebuilding the capitol building in Washington,
D.C., to Abraham Lincoln's imperial taste?

Perhaps the greatest lie about the War between the States is that
Lincoln was "the Great Emancipator". Lincoln emancipated nobody. The
man freed not a single slave. His celebrated Emancipation Proclamation
did not apply to the Norththat might have offended too many fat
Republican industrial mercantilists who owned their own black slaves.
Neither did the Emancipation Proclamation apply to the border states,
who might have been offended enough by it to secede, along with their
Southern neighbors.

The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the South, to those
states Lincoln did not control. As a result, it freed no one. It was
nothing but propaganda, which is perhaps the fanciest euphemism ever
cooked up for a plain, simple lie.

The horrible truth about the War between the States is that it
ended with many more individuals enslaved than when it began. Before
the war, most Americans were free. They owned their own lives. But by
the time it ended, everybody was the property of the state. Men were
nothing but replaceable parts in the machinery of war. Women were
nothing but factories to replace them. And the government could take
your lifeor anything else it wantedany time it wanted, for any
reason it cared to offer.

Lincoln set all of the precedents for the monsters and for the
monstrous regimes that followed after him. Even today, his example is
being used by the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as an excuse to
enslave and murder Chechens.

Now I wrote about all of this, and more, several years ago, in an
article I called "The American Lenin", and, as such, it circulated on
the Internet for quite a while. Believe me, there was nothing even
slightly controversial, historically speaking, in that article. All of
my facts came from sources favorable to "Honest Abe", historians who
approved of the way that he undid the American Revolution and ravaged
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights just as his generals undid
civilized decency and ravaged the South.

When my friend Vin Suprynowicz published "The American Lenin" in
the Las Vegas Review Journal, though, it stirred up an even greater
storm of excrement than when I'd defended the rights of smokers. I was
called everything any columnist has ever been called, including the
author of "the single worst piece of tripe ever published in an
American newspaper". I was proud of that one, and I wore it as a .sig
line in my e-mail for months.

The really fun part came when a retired history professor from
UNLV wrote to the RJ to say, "I hate to tell you folks, but Smith
got every bit about Lincoln and his war right, and them some." To my
eternal regret, the paper didn't choose to print his letter, but it
gave me satisfaction, and I felt vindicated when some time later,
Thomas diLorenzo published his monumental
The Real Lincoln, which
was everything my little article wasn't: scholarly, respectable, and
full of footnots and fresh information.

He showed me, to my surprise, that I'd been entirely too kind to a
man I'd merely called a mass-murdering megalomaniac. Of course he got
exactly the same excrement piled on his head that I had, but this is
his field, and he's better preparedin fact, he's an academic pit
bullto deal with the aggravation.

The point here is that I hadn't come up with any new information.
Just exactly as I'm doing in this speech, today, I'd simply assembled
a collection of facts that everybody already knewfor example that
Lincoln had illegally arrested 15,000 Northerners for disagreeing with
him about the war. I then cast it in a bright enough moral lightthat's
my specialtyso that everybody, whether they wanted to or
not, must see it for what it was. I could have called it "The American
Hitler", or "The American Stalin", because the only real limit to the
atrocities Lincoln and his henchmen committed was the technology of
the time.

Allow me to repeat something important. Nothing I'm saying to you
today is any great secret. Most of it comes from sources friendly to
the individuals and policies I criticize. If you doubt me, look it up
yourself. This speech will be posted on my site at www.lneilsmith.org.
Put anything you wonder about in your browser and see what happens.
But be prepared to feel differently about American history. The people
of this country are kind and good for the most part, hardworking and
productive. The ideas around which this country was created are the
best that ever were. It is those who would lead uswhether we want
to be led or notand their policies that have brought all of it
close to ruin.

In any case, the War of Northern Aggression certainly wasn't the
first conflagration kindled by a handful of lies, nor was it by any
means to be the last.

Remember the Maine? In 1898, a U.S. Navy warship blew up in
Havana, almost certainly due to poor boiler maintenance. But William
Randolph Hearst, an evil newspaper publisher who wanted the excitement
of a war to report in his chain of newspapersremember folks, "If
it bleeds it leads"and William McKinley, a President who talked to
fairies at the bottom of his garden, made sure that the frailest, most
poverty-stricken Old World nation this side of Turkey got the blame
for it.

Thus the Spanish American War began with a lie. In the middle was
Teddy Roosevelt's mythical cavalry charge up San Juan Hillwhich
was actually made on foot against a tiny band of incredibly courageous
Spanish riflemen. The war finally ended with a lie when the Moros,
people of the Philippines, whom we'd talked into fighting on our side
with promises of independence, learned that they'd simply traded one
master for another. They objected to this, so we killed as many as we
could.

But that war was merely a warm-up for what was to come in 1917,
after Woodrow Wilson had gotten himself reelected by falsely promising
American parents that their sons would never be sent to fight in a
foreign war. There happened to be a dandy one going on in Europe at
the time.

A quick perusal of the Internet reveals that there are still
defenders of the statist quo (to snatch a phrase from my friend Scott
Bieser) who want the infamous Zimmerman telegram to have been the real
thing. Americans became outraged when, supposedly, Germany told Mexico
that if it came into the War to End All Wars (another lie, of course)
on their side, they could have everything backTexas, Arizona, New
Mexico, Southern California, Clevelandthat they had lost to the
gringos since 1846.

Today many historiansthose not subsisting on federal
grantsbelieve that the Zimmerman telegram was a hoax cooked up between the
American State Department and the British government to help bring us
into what Wilson proclaimed was "the War to Make the World Safe for
Democracy".

Of course the statists claim that that's a hoax.

Then there's Lusitania, that innocent, defenseless British
passenger liner with 1500 sweet, unsuspecting American tourists
aboard, cruelly set upon and sent to Davy Jones' locker by that evil,
sneaky, underhanded German Weapon of Mass Destruction, the submarine
(which happens to have been invented and first used by an American
during the Revolutionary War).

There's a big problem with the conventional interpretation of
these events, one that the British government tried to conceal for
decades, even threatening deadly military force against the folks who
refound the Titanic, when they got too close to doing the same thing
with the Lusitania. What underwater explorers were not permitted to
discover, explorers of paperwork eventually did. Under international
law, the Lusitaniawhich was equipped with deck guns, hidden
under canvas, and was burdened with a hold full of military munitionswas
legally a ship of war.

And, therefore, fair game.

Step forward a generation. If you study the domestic policies of
the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administrations, and
compare them with the policies of Adolf Hitler and his mentor, Benito
Mussolini, you will eventually comehowever reluctantlyto the
conclusion that World War II was not a conflict between fascism and
something else, as advertised, but a conflict between competing brands
of fascism.

The catchphrase of the day was that Mussolini had managed to make
Italian trains run on time. And this countrywhatever country it
happened to be, America, Britain, Germanyneeded better discipline.
You still hear talk like that today, from terminally self-impressed
bucketheads, incapable of learning from history or from other people's
experience, like William Bennet and John Ashcroft. Today, as it has
been since the late 1950s, the menace consists of sex, drugs, and
rock'n'roll.

Back in the 30s, it was, well, sex againand alcohol and jazz.
Prohibition had laid an egg, you were expected to believe, not because
it was one of the butt-stupidest political ideas in the history of
mankind, but because people had stubbornly and upatriotically refused
to give up their individuality and the choices that naturally come
with it.

Even worse, Roosevelt's version of collectivism had failed as
badly as Vladimir Ilich Lenin's. With the exception of those being
illegally kept busy making war preparations when we were at peace,
more Americans were unemployed when the Japanese attacked Pearl
Harbor, than had been when Roosevelt was elected on his promises to
end the Depression.

Oh well, a good warand maybe nationalizing industrywould
change all that. And there just happened to be a great war brewing
once again on the next continent over. Another catch phrase sprang (or
possibly oozed) into being: "There's a war on, over there, and
America's going to be in it!"

For the Roosevelt administration, the question was how. The answer
turned out to be, "Intrepid", a codename for a secret project under
which the British government could run a spy ring on American soil,
disguised as an import company and headquartered in plush Rockefeller
Center offices, assassinate German and Japanese agentsor simply
those individuals they didn't approve ofand answer no questions
about it.

At the same time, the administration was doing everything it could
to stir up trouble with Japan. Roosevelt himself made radio speeches
in which he referred to them as "Japs" or "Nips"if I were to use
equivalent expressions in this speech, for black or Hispanic people, I
might not leave this room uninjured, and I'd certainly never be asked
to speak publicly again.

Again, illegally, Roosevelt shut off Japan's supply of imported
oil which forced them to invade other places to get it. That brought
out the very worst in the Japanese character, which was exactly what
Roosevelt needed and wanted.

Finally, after a lot of diplomatic wrangling designed to frustrate
and anger the Japanesesilencing those among them who wanted
peaceRoosevelt bottled up the most obsolete components of the Pacific
Fleet in a harbor with a narrow, shallow mouth, put out the word that
no warnings from American ships in the Pacific or the new radar just
installed above the harbor were to reach Washington, and let the
Japanese do as they wanted, which, with enough goading and insulting,
they eventually did.

You can read part of this story in John Toland's Infamy
[hardback or
paperback].
When it
came out, I discussed it with my book editor at Random House, a Soviet
affairs expert, so-called, who had dismissed a prediction in my fourth
novel, that the USSR was about to collapse, as "wishful thinking". He
also dismissed Toland's book, pointing out that a critical witness
Toland mentions, one "Seaman Z" had never come forward. Unfortunately
for my editor, Seaman Z did come forward shortly after that, although
my editor never acknowledged afterward that I'd been right and he'd
been wrong in both cases.

So much for experts.

World War II ended in ... if not a lie, then certainly one of the
blackest deeds any government ever committed. The lie is of omissionthe
fact they never told you about this in public school. Under an
agreement Roosevelt made with Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference,
toward the end of the war, American and British troops conducted
"Operation Keelhaul", in which they rounded up hundreds of thousands
of Russian refugees (Robert LeFevre told me two million), mostly in
France, people who had taken advantage of the chaos of the war to flee
Communist tyranny. American soldiersI know the son of one
suchloaded them on boxcars exactly as the Nazis had done with the Jews,
and shipped them back to Mother Russia where, within hours, they were
all shot to death.

Turn the page. It's hard to decide which part of what's sometimes
called the Korean conflictwhich consisted almost entirely of
liesconstituted the biggest lie. Me, I'm stuck between the Harry Truman
Administration's idiotic insistence that it wasn't a war, but a "Police
Action", and the idea that the GIs over there would have tolerated
somebody like Alan Alda for more than thirty seconds without fragging
him.

But we come now to "my generation's war", fully as undeclared as
the one in Korea, although nobody ever quite had the gumption to call
it a police action. The Vietnam war began (here's another liewe
had thousands of military people there already as "advisors") is said
to have begun with an "incident" in which North Vietnamese gunboats
attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The amazing thing
is that nobody at the time ever bothered to look at a map and ask what
the hell an American warship was doing in the Gulf of Tonkin to begin
with!

Be that as it may, Lyndon Baines Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin
Incident, as it came to be called, as an excuse to ask Congress (yes,
they did that in those days) to send hundreds of thousands of American
troops to Vietnam and to escalate what was going on there into a war
in which we dropped more bombs on that one tiny country than had been
dropped by all sides in World War II.

It's hard to tell what the War in Vietnam cost. Almost everybody
on both sides lied. Exaggerated "body counts"in which dead
chickens and pigs were reported as enemy fatalitieswere the order
of the day. I had a friend on a river patrol boat who used to call in
imaginary firefights on the radio while he and his buddies smoked
dope. About 65,000 Americans died, and perhaps as many as two million
Vietnamese.

I did learn to see through government lies"as through a glass
darkly"by taking the number of American B52 bombers the North
Vietnamese claimed they had shot down every month, and the smaller
number the American government admitted to, and averaging them. After
the war, it turned out that my method was correct, within one or two
percent.

After the war, we learned something else, too. The Gulf of Tonkin
Incidentthe reason offered by the government for destroying so
many lives and scarring so many morehad never happened. There had
been no Gulf of Tonkin Incident. It had been made up, out of whole
cloth.

Oddly enough, what's happening now in the Middle East, began with
a bit of unintended truth, when United States Ambassador April Glasby
told Saddam Hussein that the American government knew that Kuwait was
historically a province of Iraq, and that the Kuwaitis were illegally
slant-drilling into the vast ocean of oil under his country. It was
perfectly okay with the George H.W. Bush Administration, she told him,
if he were to invade Kuwait. And of course it was, to our government,
threatened with an end to the Cold War it had neither predicted nor
prepared for, and therefore an end to about 98 percent of its excuse
for existing.

The Iraqui military was made by the whorish media to look powerful
and fierce. Saddamwho had been invented and placed in power by
American interestsdid his part by promising us "the mother of all
battles". But after a long buildup, the actual fighting was over in a
matter of days, Bush quickly lost any popularity it had gained him,
and we got stuck with Bill and Hillary Clinton for eight endless
miserable years.

You know, aside from the little things like Waco, bombing aspirin
factories, or grabbing off mineral lands in the West for the benefit
of his Asian campaign contributors, I never could quite decide why I
disliked Bill Clinton so much. Maybe, I thought, it was his bouffant
1950s hairdo, his cruel and crooked upper lip, his sleepy killer's
eyes, his southern accentwhy the guy was a pathological Elvis
impersonator!

However as I began to write this speech, I realized what it was.
It wasn't that William Jefferson Blythe Clinton was any less truthful
than his predecessors and colleagues. No, indeed. Remember the verse,
"Jimmy Carter never lies, he always tells the truth. 'Cause every time
that Jimmy lies, he grows another tooth."
But, compared to individuals like Alexander Hamilton, Abraham
Lincoln, Vladimir Putin, William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley,
Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, William Bennet, John
Ashcroft, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, "The Man Called 'Intrepid'", Joseph
Stalin, Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, April Glasby, Saddam
Hussein, George H.W. Bush, and Alan Alda, Clinton was just such a
bad liar!

But as usual, I have digressed.

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are
expected, for example, to believe that the awful events of September
11, 2001 happened, not because we've been murdering people's children
and distorting the survivors' lives in the Middle East for almost a
century, but because they're all evil over there and envy our freedomas
if we had that much left to envy.

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We are expected
to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland
Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way
to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for
safekeeping.

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected to
overlook the fact that, although the majority of the hijackers on
September 11 were Saudis, this government chose to invade Afghanistanwhich
just happens to lie in the path of an oil pipeline George W.
Bush and his friends have been planning to build for more than a
decade.

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected
not to notice that neither Osama bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein (again)
has been captured or their bodies found or even accounted for. It's
quite sobering to think that if the Truman Administration had only
taken the same wise precaution with Adolf Hitler, and not let the
Russians find his body, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and neither of
the Gulf Wars would have been necessarybecause we'd still be
fighting World War II!

Human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies. We're expected
not to ask how come they haven't found any of Saddam Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction. I'll predict to you right now that the only
weapons of mass destruction that ever will be found in Iraq will be
those weapons of mass destruction the US government has imported.

We are all drowning in a sea of lies. During the Vietnam War,
statists in academia and the media asserted that government has a
rightperhaps even a dutyto lie in order to preserve itself.
And without a doubt, if you could go back in time and remove each and
every lie the government has ever told, the United States of Americaat
least as we know itwould cease to exist. I'll remind you
all, however, that for government, existence is a privilege, not a
right. And it is a privilege that, according to Thomas Jefferson, may
be revoked at any time.

Or should be revoked at regular intervals.

Short of that, so that we don't drown altogether, I'd like to
propose a project for the Libertarian Party vastly more important than
running somebody for President, or for any other office. It's a
project that could, in fact, make the election of a Libertarian
President possible, by putting more people on our side than anything
else we've ever done.

And we wouldn't even have to succeedjust make a big, happy,
noisy, credible attempt.

I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public
official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught
lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall
be death by public hanging.

I suggest we make this amendment our own, promote it constantly,
everywhere and anywhere we go. I suggest that we corner politicians in
publicand, even more importantly, candidatesand ask if they'll
support this amendment. We must demand an answer and keep on demanding
it until we get one.

And then we must askpubliclywhy these Republicans and
Democrats think they have a right to lie to the people who not only
pay their hyperinflated salaries, but who are supposed to be running
this country.

Take another step. The lie and the secret are two sides of the
same coin. The secret and the lie. The same amendment must make it a
hanging offensein public, and without any tasteful Lincolnian bag
over the head to hide the bulging eyeballs and swelling purple tonguesfor
any member of the government to keep secrets of any kind from
voters and taxpayers, that is to say again, from those who are forced
at bayonet-point to pay for government and who are so widely and
loudly acclaimed by the apologists for democracywhich is another
great lieto be its masters.

Our motto, which must be as widely heard and understood as
"Remember the Alamo" or "We shall overcome" must be, "No more secrets,
no more lies".

I repeat, no more secrets, no more lies.

As I said earlier this morning, the truth is not "the first
casualty of war". The truth has to be slaughtered long before a war
can begin. Therefore, if you would have peace: no more secrets, no
more lies.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution,
for some time, now, our political system has selected exclusively for
evil, stupid, and crazy bastards who can't draw a breath without
telling a lie.

I say, no more secrets, no more lies.

So now we will either find out if they can tell the truth to save
their lives, or they'll publicly insist on continuing to lie, making
it clearer to the voters than ever what they areand by contrast,
what we are.

No more secrets, no more lies.

It might just turn out to be a better slogan than "The Party of
Principle". Even individuals brought up by the public schools and the
mass media will understand itthey never seem to have understood
what a principle is. And it might just help us to stay the party of
principle, as well.

No more secrets, no more lies.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Children of the American Revolution,
I thank you.

Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23
books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders,
Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and
his collection of articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of
which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org. Autographed
copies may be had from the author at lneil@lneilsmith.org.